While admiring the fluency and invention of Wes Anderson's work, I have never taken to the cultivated eccentricity and arbitrary conduct of the characters and families in such (to me) tiresome, whimsical films as Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I was thus surprised to find myself warming to, enjoying and finally being oddly moved by his new picture, The Darjeeling Limited, which is the name of a train taken across India by three American brothers. It's scripted by Anderson himself in collaboration with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, a fixture in Anderson movies and similar offbeat independent productions.

The movie is preceded by a 10-minute short, Hotel Chevalier, in effect an oblique pre-credit sequence to the main film. In it a writer, Jack Whitman (Schwartzman), has a brief reunion with a former girlfriend (Natalie Portman) in a smart Parisian hotel. Shortly thereafter he appears on the train in India with his two older brothers, all in their thirties. The film proper begins with an American businessman (another Anderson regular, Bill Murray), racing by taxi through an Indian street to catch a train. He just misses it, but a younger man, Peter Whitman (Adrien Brody), overtakes him on the platform, catches up with the accelerating train, and makes his way from the observation platform through the crowded third-class carriages to his first-class berth. This is a graceful, wonderfully comic scene about age, agility, frustration and the term 'missing the boat'.

Murray is glimpsed again, very briefly. Brody as Peter is in virtually every shot with his younger brother Jack and his older brother Francis (Owen Wilson), who has arranged and is paying for this lengthy train journey from Mumbai to the foothills of the Himalayas. Peter is a troubled married man, worrying about divorcing his pregnant wife. Jack writes autobiographical fiction that he pretends is entirely the product of his imagination. Francis is a rich businessman, using his wealth to finance the reckless adventures and romantic dreams that challenge his place in the capitalist establishment. His head is swathed in bandages, a tooth is missing and he walks with a stick, all the result of a motorcycle accident. He's planned the trip as 'a spiritual journey', 'a life-changing experience' to mark the year that has passed since their last meeting in New York at the funeral of their father, for whose affection and attention they've competed since childhood. In a characteristic Anderson way, Francis has installed in a second-class sleeper a trusted employee who prepares the brothers' itinerary and regularly slips copies of it under their door printed on laminated cards.

The brothers bicker, fight, reminisce, engage in recriminations, fall into old patterns of behaviour and gradually find a new kind of friendship as they make their comic, sentimental journey, and it all rings true. Some years ago I had a similar experience when meeting my brother, whom I hadn't seen for 15 years and had only occasionally corresponded with during the preceding quarter of a century, as we were driving for two days across the North Island of New Zealand where he lived. We were both in our fifties. Away from home and far from our difficult shared childhood, we came together in a manner that would have been impossible under other circumstances.

The Darjeeling Limited is of course infinitely more dramatic and comic than that reunion with my brother, and Anderson packs an extraordinary amount of incident and observation into a mere 90 minutes. The brothers argue over who should have their father's razor and sunglasses. Jack, while constantly monitoring his ex-girlfriend's answering machine, has a fling with a beautiful railway hostess (Amara Karan). The train gets lost in the Rajasthan desert. The manipulative Francis reverts to bossing his brothers, insisting on ordering their food and carrying their passports. Peter buys a deadly snake, which escapes in the compartment. This, along with other offences, gets them ejected from the train, along with their excessive Louis Vuitton luggage, by a firm, scrupulously honest Sikh conductor. Wandering the country they see three peasant children about to drown, save two of them and carry the corpse of the third to his village. This results in an affecting sequence in which they're drawn into the life of this poor community. Here they meet people in a way that differs radically from their pretentious hopes of achieving spiritual epiphanies and making mystical transactions with the land. A journey that begins as a homage to the dead father ends in a pilgrimage to the Himalayan monastery (clearly modelled on the one in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus) where their strong-willed, independent mother (Anjelica Huston) has become the presumably unofficial mother superior.

Most of the music comes from the soundtracks of Satyajit Ray and the Merchant-Ivory movies, and thanks to the work of production designer Mark Friedberg, cinematographer Robert Yeoman and costume designer Milena Canonero, the picture looks magnificent. The Darjeeling Limited is a wonderful creation, a combination of Indian colour and faded imperial grandeur and one of the great movie trains. There's a beautiful tracking shot in which, in the collective minds of the three brothers, the camera passes from compartment to compartment in the train, visiting people and incidents from their past, including Natalie Portman from Hotel Chevalier, Bill Murray from the film's opening and the tiger that stalks the village near their mother's monastery.

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